Games like Wordle, honestly reviewed

Why Wordle worked

Wordle is a five-letter word guessed in six tries, with colour-coded feedback. It was released in late 2021 by Josh Wardle and bought by The New York Times in early 2022, after a viral run that briefly made a single browser page feel like a public utility. The design lesson is not “words are good”. It is that a daily game works when everyone solves the same small puzzle and can share the result without spoiling it.

The green-yellow-grey grid was the real invention: a result format that communicates exactly how well you did while revealing almost nothing. Every successful daily game since has borrowed something from that idea — a fixed puzzle, a short session, a spoiler-free share. The games below take that shape in different directions.

The roundup

Word games. Wordle is still the cleanest. Connections (The New York Times, 2023) asks you to sort sixteen words into four groups of four; the pleasure is in the final group snapping into place. Strands (2024) is a themed letter grid where you hunt for words, including one that uses every letter. Spelling Bee is the open-ended one: seven letters, as many words as you can find, and a pangram if you are lucky. Quordle runs four Wordle boards at once for people who want more; Semantle asks you to find a secret word by semantic closeness, which is a strange and excellent way to learn how words relate.

Geography games. Worldle shows a country outline; Globle gives you distance heat as you guess countries. Both are quick, daily and quietly educational.

Time and history games. This is where Gazillion lives. TimeGuessr asks you to place historical photographs in time and location; Chronophoto asks you to date archive photos from their details. Both train the same muscle as our timeline: noticing what a period looks like.

Culture and sport. Framed reveals a film one still at a time; Immaculate Grid is a baseball knowledge grid that has become a daily ritual for fans. Neither is trying to be Wordle, and both are better for it.

Where Gazillion fits

Disclosure: we make Gazillion, so treat this section accordingly. Gazillion is a daily history game: five moments, five ranges, one timeline from the Big Bang to today. It differs from the word games above in subject rather than in format — the daily ritual, the short session and the spoiler-free share are the same. It differs from the photo games in that the puzzle is a statement rather than an image: you are reasoning about when something happened, not spotting a car model in the background.

The Gazillion game takes that daily habit and points it at a different kind of knowledge: the timeline is the puzzle, and every round adds a datapoint to the map in your head. If you already like history, the rules are short and the era guide is a useful reference. Either way, we would rather you play the daily game that matches the knowledge you actually want to build. Ours happens to be chronology.

How to choose a daily game

Ask three questions. How long do I want it to take? Most of these take between two and ten minutes. What kind of knowledge do I want to exercise? Words, places, time, films, sport — each game trains something different, and the fun is usually in the one you are worst at. Do I want to compare with other people? A daily game with a shared seed gives you something to talk about; a puzzle with a unique solution gives you a small private win.

It is also fine to play several at once; they are short by design. The trap is treating any of them as a chore. If a game starts feeling like a streak you are maintaining rather than a puzzle you are enjoying, skip a day. The streak is a feature of the game, not an obligation.

One worth adding to the rotation

Gazillion is free, takes about three minutes a day, and gives you five historical moments to place on a timeline. The daily history game page explains how the day resets, the game overview explains the modes, and today's puzzle is one click away: play the Gazillion game.

If you only take one thing from this page: the daily-game genre is not about copying Wordle. It is about finding a small, repeatable question that makes you notice the world slightly differently each day. Pick the question you wish you knew more about.